Labor signs up to flawed system of funding for private schools

LABOR has hitched itself to a flawed system of Commonwealth
funding for private schools that the national network of Anglican
schools believes is unsustainable.

About 60 per cent of independent and Catholic schools have had
their funding maintained at artificially inflated levels as a
result of a "no losers" deal struck with both sides of politics.
They are exceptions to the rule of the Commonwealth funding
formula, which measures each school's need according to the
socioeconomic status of its families.

In a confidential submission to last year's internal Federal
Government inquiry into how it should distribute more than $5.5
billion of taxpayer dollars to independent schools each year, the
Australian Anglican Schools Network said maintenance could not
continue.

"Funding maintenance is not sustainable in the long term as it
ignores the logic of needs-based funding being assessed on the SES
score that is at the core of the SES model," the submission,
obtained under freedom of information laws, says.

Yesterday Peta Smith, the network's president, said a review of
inequities in the SES model was overdue because some schools had
government funding maintained at levels new schools in the same
area could not access. "Equally, there are probably some schools
that need to continue to have their funding maintained," she
said.

In his submission to the inquiry, held behind closed doors
without a final outcome, the headmaster of The King's School in
Parramatta, Tim Hawkes, agreed that funding-maintained schools were
an unsustainable anomaly. He made his submission to the inquiry
well before federal Labor pledged to sustain the SES model in its
existing form.

The NSW Greens MP John Kaye said: "It is a tragedy that the
incoming Rudd government has bought into the same flawed system of
funding."